


dead and outta this world

by beanierose, stutter



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race (US) RPF
Genre: F/F, Major Character Undeath, cracking open a boy with the cold ones, shut the FUCK up every vampire is bisexual and a MORON
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27306154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/pseuds/stutter
Summary: awhat we do in the shadows AU. katya is a beautiful, centuries-old vampire. trixie picks up her dry cleaning, and waits.
Relationships: Shea Couleé/Sasha Velour, Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Comments: 43
Kudos: 114





	dead and outta this world

**Author's Note:**

> **beanie:** i knew as soon as i started watching this dumb show that it was fertile ground for an AU, so of course i immediately had to share all my ideas with stutter, as i do every thought that enters my brain. i was so excited and pleased when she wanted to come on board; we complement each other very well, and i do my best work when she's involved. i can survive on my own, but i prefer surviving with her. have a safe and happy halloween if you're celebrating!
> 
>  **stutter:** when beanie told me she wanted to write an AU in this verse, I was like, "what a cute idea! have fun, i love you!" then, i watched approximately 3.5 episodes of the show and essentially kicked down her door and begged her to let me join her. it was such a good, funny idea, and i had so much fun playing in this world with her. i hope you love it! happy halloweeeeen!

Trixie had to wake up early for work today, so she gets to see the sun sink into the belly of the earth on her walk to the dry cleaner. It hangs suspended, enormous, in the middle of the street and her vision burns brilliant orange and red from the reflection in all of the storefront windows. Her body contracts and she retreats into the shadows, tucking herself closer to one of the buildings before she remembers that it’s fine. Trixie lets out a single, dry, self-conscious note of laughter. She can feel the last warmth of the afternoon on her skin if she likes. In fact, she ought to savor it while she still can.

The dry cleaner is still open, but Trixie compulsively checks her watch as she comes through the door, just in case. She’s been frequenting this particular establishment for almost four months, which is a new personal best. It’s not her first choice, but she burned through that a long time ago. And her second and third and fourth. It’s small inside, barely enough room for one customer at a time among the racks and racks of hanging garments, pristine and sealed away in their bags. One of the bulbs in the fluorescent strip lighting is broken and flickering aggressively and, she’s certain, making her skin look even more pallid.

“By the skin of your teeth!” somebody yells from way back behind the counter.

Trixie jolts and pushes her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, says, “Sorry?”

“We close in about three minutes.” The woman emerges from behind a rail crammed with garment bags and pointedly pops open the snaps holding together the front and back of her cobbler apron. “Right under the wire.”

“Uh-huh, my teeth,” Trixie mutters. “Right. Um. I’m picking up for. . .” She put the dry cleaning ticket inside her phone case so she wouldn’t lose it and she almost breaks a nail peeling it off so she can fish out the little seafoam bit of paper. She holds it out between two fingers, says, “Here, my ticket.”

“Lemme get that for you.” The woman glances at the number on the ticket, and then her head snaps down and her eyes spring out on stalks and she turns sharply towards the back of the store to yell, “Oh, shit. _Donna_! Count Dracula’s here!”

Trixie’s stomach makes a break for it, does a hurried little climb up to lodge itself in her chest. She clears her throat and a puff of cobwebs and dust comes out of her mouth, a spider scuttling out too. “Excuse me?”

“Honey, listen, we were all going crazy over this. Are these your clothes?” The woman is leaning forward over the counter and peering into Trixie’s face now. Her colleague, Donna, appears from the back to inspect her as well, a shirt folded over her arm like she forgot to put it down in her excitement. “You know they had blood all over them, right?” Donna makes a high, scandalized noise. “Not like it’s any of my business.”

“Oh. No. I didn’t - notice. I mean, I did, no, of course I did, yeah, my. . .” Trixie has to catch herself before she brings a hand up to press the heel of her palm into her forehead. She’s done this before, this conversation, but it never gets easier. It never gets less frightening.

Donna takes the ticket from her colleague to see the number as well, and she tells Trixie, “We said, _whoa, who do these clothes belong to, Count Dracula_?”

“That’s why I said Count Dracula just now,” the other woman says.

“All these fancy old-timey dresses covered in these big bloodstains.”

“Like Count—”

Trixie says, “You can stop saying Count Dracula,” and both women fall quiet. They exchange a look, and Trixie takes a small step back from the counter. She really would like to pick up the clothes, but she'll leave without them if she has to. It will not be the first time she’s fled the scene of the crime.

“Listen, we couldn’t get some of them out,” the woman tells Trixie. Donna has gone to collect the garment bags, beelining right for them without having to double check the number on Trixie’s ticket. She comes back and lays the two bags on the counter, both hands resting on top. “Most of them, yeah, but some of that blood was all coagulated and—”

“Got it,” Trixie says, and snatches the garment bags out from beneath Donna’s hands. “Totally get it. Well, thanks so much for trying.”

She turns for the door, both bags slung over her left arm. Donna calls out after her, “We can give you 30% off for next time. Satisfaction guarantee, you know.”

“No, it’s fine.” Trixie shoulders open the door and the little bell over it jingles merrily at her. She pauses in the threshold and turns back to look at the two women. “By the way, that was my. . . my dog died. So. That’s what. . . that’s why the blood.”

“Oh my god,” the first woman says flatly.

Trixie lifts one shoulder, says, “Yeah.”

“Oh my _god_. I’m sorry!”

“Yeah, so.”

Trixie lets the door slam behind herself, and she walks all the way back to the house because she couldn’t possibly sit still and make polite chitchat in a cab right now. She has her free hand jammed into the pocket of her coat and her shoulders up around her ears. Summer is gone, and it did not go quietly. The weather changed over the course of a single afternoon and autumn reared, roared, lashing against the windows and shrieking down the chimney. Her body feels peppered with gooseflesh, but her face is hot.

Her _dog died_? Could she have come up with a stupider excuse to offer those women? They’re going to think that the dog _exploded_ , and the owner of the ostentatious gowns currently slung over Trixie’s arm was caught in the blast radius. It’s too late now to think of something convincing, or even something just a hair less suspicious. Next time.

Trixie takes her time before she wakes Katya. She unpacks all of the newly-cleaned clothes and inspects them, looking for the stains the dry cleaners weren’t able to remove. They did a good job, even as distracted as they apparently were. There’s a stubborn dark spot half-hidden beneath the lace collar of Katya’s favorite dress, a spatter of blood vivid and violent against the white fabric. Trixie’s told her, more than once, not to wear her nice things to dinner, that she’s bound to ruin them.

 _I wasn’t planning to eat, Tritzie_ , she had said, _I just got snacky_.

Once the garments are put away, Trixie lights all of the pillar candles and the oil lamps in Katya’s chamber. She’s very particular about it, careful to gently push the edges of the wax at the top of the candles inwards once it gets soft, and to keep the wicks trimmed so they burn uniformly downwards and don’t start drunkenly slumping sideways against one another. She’s tried more than once to get Katya and the others on board with, like, regular lamps. It’s not as if the house doesn’t have electricity. Katya won’t concede to the miracle of modern development, insists on the theatre of centuries-old lighting technology.

The room readied for Katya’s awakening, Trixie scarfs a cereal bar standing up with one hand underneath her mouth to catch any crumbs. There isn’t usually a moment to herself to eat once everybody is awake; Katya doesn’t provide Trixie her state-mandated thirty minute break. Katya gets mad when she has to use the bathroom, sometimes swooping back and forth along the hallway outside and airing her grievances while Trixie tries to pee in peace.

“Katya?” Trixie raps her knuckles on the lid twice and swallows her last mouthful. “Time to get up.”

“Five more minutes!” It took Trixie a handful of months to get good at deciphering Katya’s muffled, disgruntled voice coming from inside the coffin. Now, she could understand her anywhere, from the other side of the house or if she were actually six feet down.

Trixie tucks the wrapper of her nature bar into the back pocket of her jeans to throw away later. There’s still no proof of life from within the coffin, so Trixie knocks again, says, “You told me not to let you say five more minutes.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.”

Trixie double-checked the latch holding the lid closed before she woke Katya, because the day never starts well when she gets stuck in the coffin and Trixie has to battle with the fussy mechanism with Katya howling at her from the inside. It pops open easily now, and Trixie takes a little half-step backwards even as she says, “Should I try it in a fake Russian accent?”

“Your impudence is such a turn-on, Tritzie.” One slender, pale hand escapes the confines of the coffin and Katya’s fingers move smoothly in the air, blindly circling. Trixie keeps back just enough that Katya can’t grab her. “I’m hungry. Stick your arm in here.”

“If you drain me now, who’s going to bring you your dry-cleaning?”

“OOH! All my ruffly bits, back and smelling like lemony freshness.” Katya barks one single, sharp note of laughter and shoves open the lid. It slams against the side of the coffin with a thud that echoes through the house and a mushroom cloud of dust blooms out of it. “Groovy. Get me out of here.”

Trixie holds out her hand and Katya’s cold fingers close around her wrist. She uses that grip to haul herself to her feet, nearly tearing Trixie’s arm out of the socket as she does. Trixie, after years of this, knows just how to brace herself so she gets to keep all of her appendages when she goes to bed each morning. It isn’t that Katya doesn’t know her own strength, quite the opposite; she’s making sure that Trixie knows it too.

“They couldn’t get all the stains out. Sorry. And I’m gonna have to find a new place, the lady behind the counter said—”

Katya is smoothing out her skirts with the flats of both palms, and she doesn’t look up to say, “Oh that’s fascinating. Trixie, this story is just _fascinating_.”

“Okay. I get it.” Trixie lets too much of her huff leak into her voice, and Katya’s head moves up and around to see her, slow and unnatural as an animatronic.

Even in the low light of the chamber, her pale eyes are shiny and piercing. Her hair is flat against the back of her head from her day’s sleep, and in the front it hangs down to her hipbones in soft, white-blonde waves. Her skin is smooth and cold as porcelain, her lips and lashes dark. All of her human reflexes are long gone. She doesn’t breathe, doesn’t blink, has never coughed or sneezed in all the time Trixie has known her.

Trixie looks away. They have an agreement; Katya won’t ever put Trixie under her thrall. She isn’t always doing it on purpose, and Trixie is careful never to look at her too long lest she find herself drowsily laying down at Katya’s feet and exposing the warm, zoetic column of her throat.

Katya angles her chin, curious to see what Trixie’s next move will be. Her bottom lip has two small, symmetrical indents from her canines, but when her mouth is closed the fangs are completely hidden. Even when she’s talking people don’t usually notice them, made sweet and stupid as lambs by her. Katya yawns widely and her teeth glint like steel in the candlelight. She glides smoothly up over the lip of the coffin and settles in front of Trixie, hovering a few inches off the ground to force Trixie to look up into her face.

Her bottom lip juts out, ripe and dark as a plum, and she says, “I’m hungry.”

“You’ve got half of that mall cop that you didn’t finish from yesterday, do you want that?” Trixie offers.

Katya swoops suddenly down to the ground with a thud, just so that she can stomp her foot and say, “I’ll still be hungry after!” She recalibrates again, back to her regular height, careful to always be just a little taller than Trixie is. She waits, but Trixie won’t entertain her tantrum, so Katya drifts listlessly through the room and settles herself at her vanity table. Trixie, standing behind Katya, meets her own eyes in the mirror.

“Why don’t you finish him first and then see how you feel, okay?”

She gets a whiny, indiscriminate noise for that. Katya starts brushing through her hair and the comb in the mirror works methodically through the empty air. She’s in a snit because Trixie didn’t have a nice plump virgin laying supine at her feet when she woke up. The thrill of a hunt is important for Katya, the slow seduction of some poor civilian enough to occupy her for an entire evening and buoy her for an entire week. It’s like eating too much take-out if Trixie gets dinner every single time. It makes her lethargic and unhappy.

Trixie stares at the back of Katya’s head for a moment, waiting to see if she’s going to acknowledge her at all. She gets nothing, so Trixie leaves her to her tantrum and heads downstairs, more as a means of escape than for any particular reason. It’s not as if she can hide, or have a moment to herself, unless Katya allows it.

* * *

Trixie bursts through the door into the auditorium, breathless with adrenaline and feeling tender towards the whole world. The post-show music has faded up, noisy instrumental versions of “Time Warp” and “Sweet Transvestite” wafting through the air just as they have been through her ribcage all night. She accepts congratulations from audience members with a magnanimous smile like they’re bouquets of roses, her arms laden with bliss. Her face aches from smiling all through bows, her feet ache from the tap shoes she’s carrying slung over her shoulder now. She turns around, feeling buoyed by the crowd but feeling unmoored, too, like she might float right up to the ceiling. There’s a woman she hasn’t seen before, a woman she _definitely_ would have remembered seeing. She’s alone, and hovering at the periphery of the room. Trixie, feeling extra generous and charismatic, moves smoothly through the throng of people to her.

“Oh, wow. Great costume.”

“Oh, this old thing?” The woman glances down at herself, at the many-layered, complicated garment she’s wearing. It does actually look old, moth eaten around the edges and like it might cough up a lungful of dust if anybody were to nudge this woman. “Yes. Very nice up there, your little play.”

Trixie smiles widely and says, “Thank you so much! Thanks for coming out.” The woman doesn’t smile back, but she has stopped glancing around the room now. Her pale eyes are focused on Trixie’s face. “So. . . are you a Virgin?”

“I very beg your pardon?” The woman bursts into a loud, shrill note of acerbic laughter that makes several people in their immediate vicinity turn and look at her. She draws her cloak haughtily around herself and says, “No. Hardly. But I am quite young and fresh-faced, yes. Are you? You have that look.”

“How could I be a Virgin?” Trixie says slowly. “I’m in the show! You’re funny.”

The woman is still staring right at her, and the edges of Trixie’s vision are beginning to get the tiniest bit blurry. She feels twittery, adolescent, like she’d be twirling the ends of her hair around her finger if it weren’t still pin curled down from the wig cap. The woman says, “Uh-huh. Of course.”

“I just joined the cast this year, but I must’ve seen it a hundred times before that. It’s my favorite.” A flush is creeping across Trixie’s chest now and her words are all pushing and shoving, jostling each other on their way out of her mouth.

“Really.”

“Yeah. I mean, I love Halloween, don’t you?” Trixie giggles. “I think I like it better than Christmas. I mean, I’m sure you get it, in this whole look.” She reaches out and fluffs the top layer of the woman’s skirt, emboldened from photosynthesizing beneath the stage lights, feeling girlish and flirtatious. The woman looks down at Trixie’s hand still holding her skirt, nonplussed. Trixie says, “The spooky season, you know? Playing dress-up. Witches and vampires and stuff.”

A shadow passes across the woman’s face and she says, “And stuff. Why don’t you tell me more about it? Unless I’m taking you away from any. . . I don’t know, family members, concerned roommates, other close personal well-wishers.”

“No, no,” Trixie tells her. “It’s just me.”

There really isn’t anyone watching out for her, not anymore. Trixie feels woozy, impressionable, foolish, and she allows herself to be led through the crowd by this woman, her hand cold against the stage-hot skin of Trixie’s arm. Walking out of the door and into the night feels like walking on the moon. Trixie is wearing a robe over the garters and corset ensemble she ended the show in and she starts shivering immediately but it doesn’t even matter. She walks dutifully along next to the woman, who introduces herself as Katya. Everything feels dreamlike and insubstantial and Trixie holds her own hand in front of her face, expecting to be able to see right through it. She’s out here in the dark with this beautiful woman and her sharp teeth and she feels so sleepy and content.

Katya leads her over to a bench next to the path through campus and sits down right beside her, her body angled towards Trixie’s. She reaches out to where a curl has sprung free from its pin and tugs on it very gently. Trixie’s body begins to list helplessly towards Katya. Her mouth opens wide and her eyes flash suddenly yellow, the pupils like slits and the whites of them completely red.

Trixie screams and startles backwards, almost toppling right off the end of the bench, and she says, “Oh my god. Oh my _god_!”

“What’s the matter, Tracy, my darling?” Katya’s eyes are regular again, almost gray in the low light.

The fog clears out of Trixie’s brain and she shakes her head, feels the last wisps drift lazily out of her ears. Now, she feels more awake than she ever has. She jabs a finger in Katya’s direction and says, “I know what you are!”

“A big fan of cult cinema, yes.”

“You’re— you’re trying to— oh my god.” Trixie throws both hands over her neck and leaps to her feet, moves around behind the bench to put it between them.

Katya rests her arm along the back of it and lets her hand hang down, her long fingers fluttering absently in the air as she says, “Huh. You know, normally at this point, you’d be all pliable and woozy.” She pouts at Trixie, makes her voice high and condescending to say, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do that instead?”

“Are you a fucking vampire, Katya?” Trixie folds her arms over her chest, feeling absolutely indecent in just her thin rayon robe.

“If I say no,” Katya says after a moment, “will you just quietly come back over here and stare into my eyes for a few more seconds?”

She does, actually, want very much to do that. Even now that Trixie isn’t under her thrall anymore, Katya is still completely captivating. But she’s freezing cold, and her tap shoes keep bashing her in the spine, and oh, right, she doesn’t particularly feel like becoming Katya’s dinner.

“Oh my _god_. You’re like— and you’re not even going to try to convince me that I’m wrong?” Trixie has been pacing, agitated, but she whips around to face Katya again. “Isn’t gaslighting like a major component of your whole seduction strategy?”

“Well, no offense, Tritzie, but what’s the point? It never really works out as intended, does it, only belabors the point. And I’m getting awfully hungry.”

“How old are you?” Trixie blurts, like a true idiot.

Katya shrieks an atonal note of laughter and says, “Seventeen. I have been seventeen for a long time, yes. I have seen other movies besides your beloved Rocky Horror. Now come back over here, please.” She crooks two fingers at Trixie.

She finds herself taking a couple of inebriated steps back towards the bench and she jerks back again, says, “No! You’re going to try to eat me!”

“Oh, I’m not going to try to eat you. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going to _do_ it. There is no ‘try.’ That’s from another film I have seen.” Katya lunges right over the back of the bench, her cloak billowing behind her as she surges at Trixie. Her mouth is wide open again, her fangs glistening.

“WAIT!”

Katya stops where she is and just sort of hangs there, in midair, frowning down at Trixie. “Hmm?”

“You don’t have to kill me.” She doesn’t even really know what she’s saying, doesn’t have a plan beyond the end of the sentence. But she won’t — she _can’t_ — go out like this. They haven’t even made it to closing night yet.

Katya drifts daintily down until she’s standing just a couple of feet away from Trixie. “I can’t exactly let you run back to all your little friends and tell them all about me, can I?”

“I can help you. I can. . . I can tell you where the _actual_ virgins are. We can be a team. You can turn me!” Katya laughs again, dry and devoid of humor. “I’m serious! I love vampires, I told you!” As Trixie is saying it, it becomes true. She’s in her senior year, with absolutely no plans post-graduation. It feels like fate that she met Katya tonight, like the universe is nudging her. “Oh my god, this is the best day of my life. Why don’t you do it? Turn me!”

“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t just go around _turning_ people, you know, there’s protocol, there’s rules.”

Trixie chews on the inside of her cheek. She’s done a lot of reading. There are ways she can ingratiate herself with the vampire, ways she can bide her time until Katya agrees to turn her. “Well, I’ll be your familiar, then. I know you could use the help. Why else would you be here, trawling college campuses for virgins to pick off yourself? Someone could be hand-delivering them to you. That someone could totally be me.”

“I am perfectly self-sufficient, thank you.”

“The wrinkles in that skirt tell a different story,” Trixie says. Katya hisses at her, fangs bared once more. “I’m just saying! That’s taffeta, right? That’s hard to clean. You’re busy. You don’t have the time.”

She has Katya in her clutches. The vampire holds her skirt out in front of herself in both hands to inspect it, and then she looks up and says, “My schedule is admittedly punishing, yes.”

Some dude Trixie vaguely recognizes is walking right by them, lost in the cloud of smog emanating from his vape pen. Trixie gestures at him and says, “Look, you see that guy over there? I know him. He’s in my stats class. I guarantee he’s never gotten past second base.”

“You would hand over a friend like this? For me?” Katya rests one hand over her heart in mock bashfulness.

“To save my own hide?” Trixie says wryly. “Uh, yeah, every single time. This is the kind of high-quality familiarship you can expect if you take me on.” Katya isn’t looking at her anymore, she’s watching Devin from stats class. Trixie shudders, says, “Also, we are not friends, he’s a total creep.”

Katya turns just her head to look at Trixie, her eyes reptilian and horrifying again, and she grins conspiratorially. She swoops away in a noisy display of flapping to go and murder the poor kid. Trixie empties her lungs in relief and thunks down heavily on the bench again. Already, she’s forming a list in her brain of the things she’ll need from her dorm room, the things she wants to bring with her for eternity. Her insides feel like neon. She’s going to be a _vampire_.

* * *

In the parlor, Sasha is flitting around the ceiling in her bat form, occasionally swooping down to butt her affectionate head against Shea’s face.

“Oh, Trinity, there you are,” Shea says when she sees Trixie come in. She’s got an assortment of scattered papers spread across the table in front of her, the loose sheaths fluttering every time Sasha flies by. “Listen, I need you to go out and fetch us a few things. Shouldn’t be too complicated, should it?” She picks up one of the papers and runs a long, elegant finger down her list. “A projector, three mirrorballs—”

Sasha appears suddenly next to Shea in her human form and leans over her shoulder to study the list as well. “Better make it six, we have to think about symmetry—”

“One of those signs that does the different words running across it, like, “twenty percent off all shoes” in different colors—”

The two of them are younger than Katya is, but the difference stops mattering once you get over a hundred years or so. They have a quarter-millennium collectively, so even in their best attempts at being artsy and modern they are several decades behind the living world.

Trixie says, “Uh, sorry, first of all, I’m Trixie, not Trinity. Trinity mysteriously disappeared last month.” The two of them share a look, and Sasha runs an awkward hand over her smooth, bald head. “And I don’t know where I’m going to get all those things at this hour, but I can order them on Amazon and they’ll be here in a couple days, maybe?”

“Trinity, it’s not your fault that you are very stupid,” Sasha says, the corners of her mouth like flint. “But there are no mirrorballs in the Amazon, it is a large jungle.”

Shea’s eyes focus on something over Trixie’s shoulder, and she turns to see Katya gliding smoothly into the room in all her gruesome splendor. Her face is bloodied from below her nose all the way to the hollow of her throat. She’s been careful with her clothes this time, at least, only a few splatters on the collar of her gown that Trixie can easily lift with a Tide To Go pen.

Katya wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and takes the handkerchief Trixie is holding out to her. She dabs delicately at her face and says, “You can’t tell her what to do. She’s _my_ familiar. If you didn’t keep using your familiars for your, you know, _soft sculpture_ , you wouldn’t have this problem.”

Sasha and Shea both bare their fangs and hiss at Katya and she rises further from the ground, brings her hands up into claws and hisses right back. Trixie rolls her eyes and props her hip against the antique table to wait for the three of them to settle down. It’s not a balanced fight, but Katya is ferocious and Sasha and Shea are the first to back off, both haughtily dropping their arms and closing their mouths with a last, petulant hiss.

“But did I hear something about all shoes in different colors?” Katya says to Trixie. She seems startled to find herself so much further off the ground than usual and she floats back down, right into a chair. She crosses her legs at the ankles and folds her hands neatly into her lap, perfectly genteel. She’s at her most amenable right after eating, they all are, and her gaunt face is flushed. “You may go out and fetch me some of those.”

Trixie sighs and takes her glasses off to wipe them with a tissue. Some blood spattered them when Katya was flying around over her head. “No, I- no! Nothing’s going to be open at this hour.”

Things are difficult at this time of year, when the nights start to draw longer and the three of them have a bigger window of time in which they’re awake. At the height of summer Trixie only has to take care of them for a handful of hours. She always ends up with more time alone than she knows what to do with. It makes her restless, makes her antsy; she’s glad for the company, even if it does mean she’s getting bossed around for sixteen hours a day by the time December rolls around.

“Trinity would have been able to find them,” Shea says without lifting her eyes from her pages and pages of diagrams.

“Well, as we’ve discussed, I’m not Trinity, I’m Trixie. And Trinity got eaten after about six months, and I’ve been here for five years, so.”

Sasha grins, showing all of her sharp teeth, and says, “Katya, your familiar is so mouthy.”

“So sensitive.”

“It’d be great if you could not say ‘mouthy’ while you look at me like that,” Trixie says. Sasha snaps her teeth at Trixie and then immediately leaps into the air, already in her bat form before her feet have left the ground. She erupts into a cacophony of squeaking and barrels out of the open window and into the night, cutting graceful, swooping arcs through the air as she goes.

Shea has begun unravelling a long string of fairy lights and she immediately gets tangled up in them like a kitten with a ball of yarn, confused and furious. Trixie takes the list of demands from the table and scans it briefly, then tucks it into her back pocket to keep safe. When she glances over, Katya is watching her from the antique Queen Anne chair she favors and her face is warm with something Trixie wants to call pride. As soon as their eyes meet Katya scoffs and looks hurriedly away.

Shea declares that she’s headed out for the evening and leaves Trixie in the parlor. She’s glad to be able to focus without Shea and Sasha art-directing loudly on either side of her. An overworked power strip plugged into the wall is intermittently spitting sparks, biding its time until it can burn the house to the ground, and Trixie turns her attention to it. She’s peripherally aware that Katya is still here, perhaps watching her, perhaps reading some obscure novel in a language that doesn’t exist anymore.

There are never any footsteps, what with all the floating, so Trixie startles when Katya says from right beside her, “Five years, Trinsty, wow. Quite a momentous number for a creature with such a heartbreakingly short lifespan.”

“Uh-huh.” Trixie opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. When she glances up from the complex tangle of electrical cables and wires in her hands, Katya is kneeling right next to her, actually touching the ground for once. Her face is faintly pink around her mouth still, like a little kid left unsupervised with a punnet of strawberries. Trixie says, “Five years tonight.”

Katya is quiet for a moment, just peering into Trixie’s face. The skirts of her gown have billowed out around her so they’re both in a lake of silk and lace and taffeta. The silence grows thick and occlusive, settles itself uncomfortably between them with sharp elbows. Trixie has allowed herself to look at Katya just a little too long and she feels woozy, impressionable, foolish. She blinks heavily, her body begins to drift sideways, and Katya swiftly gets to her feet. She says, “Make sure you tape down those wires. I don’t want them getting stuck on my cloak and ruining my nifty glides,” and she sweeps out of the room.

* * *

“Oh, really. Really! Pull yourself together!” Katya flutters past the bathroom door again and clicks her tongue at Trixie. She did kick it closed behind herself, thank you so much, but among the many things she sacrificed when she became Katya’s familiar was any scrap of privacy. “You know what I am, yes? You know this is part of the job description, for you and me?”

Trixie’s abdomen aches. She gags again, retches over the toilet bowl, but her stomach is empty now. She groans and rests her cheek against the seat, the porcelain cool and lovely. Her stomach is roiling, drawn up into a tight fist. She breathes slowly through her nose and concentrates on not gagging again. She still feels winded from running up three flights of stairs, barely making it to the bathroom in time after watching Katya dismember and drink a human man. And, after she’s done expelling the entire contents of her stomach, it’s her job to dispose of him.

“Tritzie, among my kind, I am revered for my excellent table manners.” Katya is agitated as a goose, long-necked and flapping, and looking at her fussing around just outside the doorway is making Trixie seasick. “This is beginning to feel not a small amount personal. I mean, I kept his head on and everything.” A wet sob escapes Trixie and she heaves again, moaning into the toilet, her eyes streaming. Katya says, “Oh wow, a mellifluous and inventive new sound. You’re certainly bringing a lot of creativity to the table, _kroshka_.”

Now that her stomach is completely empty, so much it feels turned inside out, Trixie dares to move away from the toilet. She stretches a trembling arm up and bats blindy around until she finds the flush, then collapses against the side of the cabinet. Trixie swipes her mouth weakly. Katya shifts into her bat form and flies down the hall, reappearing just a moment later as her human self with a glass. She fills it from the faucet and passes it to Trixie, who swills some around her mouth and then spits the awful sour taste into the toilet bowl. She takes slow, nervous sips from the remainder of the glass and says, “What’sat?”

“ _Kroshka_?” Katya sits on the tile very gingerly, fussing with the skirts of her dress so that they’re not draped over Trixie. She has a strange impulse to take off all of her clothes and lay down right on the floor. “It’s. . . I guess, translates to, like, crumb.” Katya gestures with her fingers, makes a tiny space between her thumb and index and shows Trixie. “ _Leeetle_ crumb.”

“I don’t like that.” Trixie’s lip quivers, and a fresh wave of tears spurts out of her, angry and hot.

“Oh, well, excuse me.”

She would like to be left alone to her misery, but Katya has gotten comfortable on the floor now, leaning against the side of the bathtub. Trixie finishes the rest of the water in her glass and feels it splash into the chasm of her stomach. She says, “You know, like, I’m not little, I’m just new at this, okay? I’ll get better. I’m just— I’m a vegetarian, Katya, this is a major adjustment for me.”

“You’re. . . a _what_?”

“I don’t eat meat. I try to avoid animal products.”

Katya stares at Trixie for a beat and then shrieks a laugh, her head thrown back so suddenly and severely it makes Trixie jump. She laughs for a long time, swiping at her cheeks as if she can still produce tears. Trixie closes her eyes and rests her head back against the cabinet, moaning softly to herself. When Katya’s done wringing the last of the laughter out of herself, she says, “This is such nonsense as I will never comprehend. You humans, always finding new ways to create problems for yourselves. ‘Don’t eat meat.’ ‘Laws of governance.’ ‘Bipartisan system.’ All nonsense. Look: does the little bird cry as it eats the decaying meat from the teeth of the alligator?”

Trixie feels hollow and unhappy and too exhausted to engage with whatever tangent Katya is rapidly headed for. She manages, weakly, “What?”

It isn’t a big bathroom, made smaller still by Katya’s many-layered skirts. She scoots across the tile a little ways and splays her legs wide so that she’s almost boxing Trixie in. Both of her hands come up and she makes a puppet show of them, her hands pinched and primed for a conversation. The lace detailing at the sleeves of Katya’s dress make it so that Trixie imagines each puppet to be wearing a decadent ruff, the kind Shea is often swanning around in.

Katya says, “Does she say, ‘Oh, alligator, great and beautiful predator, why did you have to eat this helpless animal?’”

She looks expectantly at Trixie, who blinks, flummoxed, and says slowly, “I’m assuming not?”

“No, Tritzie, that’s correct. She says, ‘Thank you for the delicious scraps.’ And the beautiful alligator says, ‘Thank you for the cleaning my teeth.’” Katya scoots a little closer still, her hands right in front of Trixie’s face now and chatting cheerfully. “This is how nature goes. You see?” Trixie says nothing, manages something approximating a shrug. “The alligator is a fearsome predator,” Katya tells her seriously. “The little bird—“ she reaches out and taps Trixie on the nose. Trixie, alarmed, rears back and smacks her head against the cabinet. Katya continues, “Is lucky to clean her beautiful teeth. And the helpless animal is neither of their problems. And if the little bird can’t hack it, if it’s too much for her to bear, the alligator can always just snap its jaws shut and end the trouble right there.” She takes the two puppet mouths of her hands and claps them shut suddenly before Trixie’s face. Trixie doesn’t flinch, but she does clench her jaw tightly, and Katya’s smile widens, goes sharper. In the dingy light of the bathroom, the whites of her eyes seem, briefly, almost yellow, reptilian.

Trixie straightens, manages to lift her head away from the bathroom cabinet, and she says firmly, “You’re not going to kill me.”

“Oh, no? I’m not?” Katya raises her eyebrows and inclines her head curiously. “Are you so sure?”

“I thought you only liked virgin blood.”

“You think dry-humping your copy of _New Moon_ counts? Trinsty, please.” Trixie opens her mouth to protest, her face so scorching that she’s sure Katya must be able to feel the radiant heat coming off her, as close as she is. “Back in my day, you were a virgin until two goats and some prized candlesticks had changed hands over your soiled bedsheets.”

There’s so little space between them now that if Trixie leaned forwards even an inch, her nose would bump Katya’s. Her eyes lower to Katya’s thigh, pale and exposed where the skirts of her dress have ridden up. She says sullenly to it, to her own hands, “You don’t know about my bedsheets.”

“And I surely don’t want to.” Katya floats up from the floor and straightens herself out, gazes down at Trixie like something ethereal. The frightening kind, the kind with too many eyes, the kind that burns so brilliantly you can’t bear to face it. She says, “Get this cleaned up and come back downstairs. Lots to do before the dawn, little bird. And i’m still feeling peckish.”

* * *

Alone in the parlor, Trixie puts her earbuds in and allows herself the small luxury of listening to a playlist. Whenever the vampires catch her using her phone they shriek and hiss and work themselves into a frenzy of hysteria, tell her to put away her _haunted cube_. Which, like, they ride the bus, so it isn’t like they’re completely oblivious to how much the world has changed since they died. They just don’t like Trixie to have anything that’s hers, anything they don’t understand. And they’re jealous that the screen of the phone doesn’t recognize them if they try to touch it. While she works she refers occasionally to Sasha and Shea’s direction, but without anyone hovering over her she has creative freedom for once and she relishes it.

When she’s finished she surveils her work, her chest puffed up and glowing pink. Trixie removes one of her earbuds and is greeted immediately with the sound of low, anguished moaning from the basement. She sighs and puts it back in, cranks up the volume on her phone a couple notches. Katya makes quick work of a victim once she has them under her guile. She doesn’t give them the chance to realize what’s happening, lets them be stunned and oblivious until the very end. Not the other two. They like the flint taste of adrenaline, the wide-eyed terror, the trembling. It makes an awful mess.

Something shifts in the house, an eerie calm rolling through the enormous rooms like fog off Raritan Bay. Trixie stuffs her headphones into her pocket just in time for all three of the vampires to come swishing into the parlor like the world’s most ironic funeral procession. Sasha is even wearing a veil for some reason, which Katya keeps batting at to make it flutter and fall awkwardly into her eyes. Sasha hisses at her and Katya shrieks, delighted.

“All right, let’s see the damage.” Shea snaps her fingers in Trixie’s direction and she hands over the sheath of papers she’s been working from.

“I tried to follow all your diagrams.”

Sasha is hovering close to the ceiling, nose to nose with the string lights Trixie almost broke her neck trying to hang. She’s making a low-frequency, anguished noise as she studies Trixie’s work. Shea says, “ _Tried_ is the operative word here, Trinity.”

“I’m—”

“We’ll have to start from scratch,” Sasha erupts very suddenly, and unhinges her jaw to unleash a terrible, eerie sound. Trixie does such a good job of keeping the three of them content that she forgets what Sasha’s epithet is. _The shrieker_. “The ambience is completely off. The key and fill are utterly wrong tones. This looks _nothing_ like sunlight. You wouldn’t understand.” Sasha flickers from bat to human form and back again several times very quickly.

There was a time, in the beginning, when Trixie still knew fear. All of the strange and unusual behavior of the house’s occupants still startled her. When Sasha howled her awful, bestial roar Trixie’s palms would grow damp and her heart would pound in her throat as if to remind the vampires that it was there. She had to wait out in the garden while they were eating because she couldn’t bear to be under the same roof. Now, Trixie is mostly just impatient. She wants it for herself, wants to be able to scream and thrash and transmogrify over the slightest inconvenience.

When Trixie glances at Katya she’s wincing. Trixie rolls her eyes, since Shea isn’t paying attention to her and Sasha is still in a frenzy of flapping, the room filled with the noisy beating of leather wings, leather robes. Trixie projects her voice to be heard all the way up on the vaulted ceiling, says, “Okay, like, I also went to theater school, I know what that means. And not to be rude, but I’ve seen daylight a bit more recently than you have, and I think this looks sun-adjacent.”

Shea holds her arm out and makes a series of ultrasonic clicks and squeaks that Trixie feels go right through her skull rather than hears. Settled in her bat form, Sasha flies down and grips the underside of Shea’s arm to hang down and stare at Trixie. Her tiny mouth opens to bare her small teeth, baby’s first fangs, and her porcine nose wrinkles.

Shea gathers the creature up in her fingers and strokes the spiky hair on the crown of its head. “Perhaps use your words, my darling,” she says gently, “as mellifluous as your many ear-splitting screams are, and as much high-octane fear and sexual excitement as they inspire in all our hearts.”

“Extremely gross, speak for yourself,” Katya says cheerfully.

Sasha pops back into existence next to Shea and wails, “Oh but this is a travesty. Shea, it’s ruined. I’m _ruined_.”

“I mean, if I’ve done such a terrible job.” Trixie folds her arms over her chest and raises both eyebrows, since she has them. “I can always leave a curtain open for you in the morning and you can see a little sunlight for yourself, to compare and contrast. . .”

“ _Don’t joke about that!!_ ” Sasha howls.

Trixie turns her head and widens her eyes at Katya. It’ll take her hours if they make her start over, she’ll be here until the morning. Katya gives Trixie the tiniest nod and says without looking away, “You’re deluding yourself if you think she’ll do it better a second time.” Trixie closes her eyes in gratitude for a moment. When she opens them again, Katya is waltzing over to the fortepiano to repeatedly press the same key so the same bum note plinks dully over and over. “If you want something done right, etcetera, I literally am too bored to finish the aphorism. And anyway, who’s going to see it besides yourselves? _Farrah_? I hear psychic vampires love amateur performance art.”

Sasha and Shea scowl and hiss at Katya. She blanks them completely and they flounce out of the room in a susurrus of shifting fabric, tossing their skirts around themselves just for the joy of being noisy. Katya is admiring the oil portrait of herself that hangs over the fireplace, having drifted up a few feet like an untethered balloon so that she’s eye-level with it. She doesn’t turn around to say, “Oh, Tritzie. . . meet me in my chambers later.”

“You need something, Katya?” Sasha’s frenzied flapping has sent all of the papers scattering through the room and Trixie goes to her knees to begin gathering them together. “What’s up?”

“No no, just.”

“Because I’m not that busy, we can just go now.”

Trixie huffs a little breath to get the hair out of her eyes and looks up. Katya has come down from the ceiling but she’s still swooping restlessly through the room in circles and refusing to look at Trixie. “Can you let me do a thing! My chambers. Later. I have a surprise for you.”

Something small comes to life in Trixie’s stomach, a gleeful fluttering. Katya’s already brought up her anniversary once this evening, so it doesn’t feel unsafe or foolish to hope. She schools her face, keeps her voice carefully neutral to say, “You do?”

“I’m not made of stone, Tritzie,” Katya says, and then immediately takes a corner too sharply and crashes right into the wall. She careens off of it, unharmed, and a crack zigzags through the plaster.

* * *

Trixie is flirting with her third anniversary when Katya brings home the haunted knife. She had gone to a flea market held in the sewer system, a kind of vampire bazaar that takes place every ten years. Trixie had politely declined, and then firmly refused when Katya had tried to insist she come along and hold all of her various wares and artifacts. She’d heard about it from Aja, who had been forced to go by Sasha and Shea and who’d told tales of trudging through an inch of sewage while all the vampires hovered daintily above it, of stalls where you could choose a familiar from a Rolodex and have them delivered to your house the next day, of plump virgins chained to the wall, their heads hanging drowsily forwards. So, like, Trixie’s not trying to be in attendance.

It’s close enough to sunrise that Trixie’s beginning to feel agitated, when Katya finally comes bursting through the front door. She’s half in her bat form like she got too excited to commit to either state and she’s beating her enormous leathery wings in pleasure. When she sees Trixie she rummages in the skirts of her dress and pulls out a knife, brandishes it at her. “Tritzie! Look at this marvelous specimen.”

“Uh-huh,” Trixie says slowly.

Katya’s holding the knife out towards her now, hilt first. It’s layered with eyeballs of all different sizes and colors like a sort of grisly, ocular totem pole. The blade itself is crimson, matte, curved slightly at the tip. The whole thing is as long as Katya’s arm. At the very top is a milky, opaque eye that Katya points out to Trixie, as proud as if she’d crafted it herself, and says, “A blind witch’s eye!” Trixie doesn’t probe her, doesn’t want to know whether that’s just the inspiration for the design or whether it’s literal. “She is a real beauty, don’t you think so Tritzie? Very nice, yes. It reminds me of the one my mother gave to me all these years ago when I was a girl.”

“Your mother gave you. . . a knife?” Trixie pushes it back into Katya’s hands, unhappy with the heft of it in her own, the strange urge she has to wield it. “When you were. . . you mean, like, a _small_ girl?”

“Excuse me with the judgmental gaze, Tritzie.” She’s long ago given up correcting Katya, nudging her gently towards the traditional pronunciation of her name. It’s better than the array of colorful appellations she gets from Sasha and Shea. “She told me it would be part of my dowry someday. Also, the frequent raids in the neighboring villages were cause for some concern.” Katya looks up from the knife finally, but she continues to turn it over in her hands. She meets Trixie’s eyes and says very solemnly, “I used to sleep with it under my pillow.”

Trixie snorts and says, “That sounds incredibly ill-advised and dangerous. And, like, not at all comfortable.”

Katya waves a dismissive hand at her and tells her to please put away in her chamber the rest of the things she acquired from the marketplace. “Be careful of the teeth!” Katya calls after Trixie as she makes her way up the stairs, her arms laden with various packages that seem to have been wrapped with the singular goal of being as cumbersome as possible for whichever poor familiar has to lug them around.

Things are fine at first. Katya won’t let the knife out of her sight, won’t even let it out of her hands. For the first day or two she simply carries it with her everywhere and talks to it the way a child does to a favored stuffed animal. Whenever Sasha and Shea try to get a peek she hisses and shields it with her body. That part is unsettling, but okay. Then Katya starts behaving like she’s in a pulpy slasher flick and launching the knife across the room at random, sending it whistling right past Trixie’s ear to lodge itself into the wall. All those nicks in the beautiful, original beams that Trixie’s going to be tasked with repairing, somehow.

The knife is a fast learner, and it soon starts shooting around the room of its own accord. Especially when Trixie is there. The others think it’s a delightful game, because they can catch it out of the air like it’s a softball. One time, Shea catches the thing right through the meat of her palm and spends the night wandering around the house showing everybody the awful eyeball hilt sticking out of her hand, before Katya gets mad and demands she give it back. Trixie’s fallible, flesh body is much more susceptible to actual grievous harm, and there are a few close calls. One time, she swears she sees the knife make a ninety-degree turn in midair and beeline right at her so she has to duck out of its way.

After a while, Trixie devises a sort of makeshift shield from a cutting board strapped to her arm with a couple of belts, so she can protect herself from the knife’s unprovoked assaults on her. It means that all of her usual tasks take twice as long, because she spends the entire night having to be hypervigilant and aware of her surroundings, ready for it to come hurtling at her any moment.

The final straw comes when she is awoken at two o’clock in the afternoon by the knife flinging itself furiously at her bedroom door over and over. It’s making fast work of it, making a hole in the wood and sending chippings flying around everywhere. Trixie stands among the detritus of her poor door and bellows _Katya!_ loud enough to raise the dead. Which it does. Katya emerges from her chamber groggy and even more irritated than she usually is in the mornings.

“This is— really, Tritzie, the _screaming_? Get a hold of yourself, it is not—” She stops in the hallway and her face breaks open with glee. The knife is now hovering in mid-air and rotating furiously, pointed straight down at the floor like it’s gearing up to bore its way into the center of the earth. At this point, Trixie is fairly certain it is doing these things specifically to freak her out.

Katya, delighted by its erratic behavior, snatches the knife out of the air and coos a long strain of Russian to it, her voice lilting like she’s singing the world’s most frightening lullaby to the world’s sharpest baby. The knife stops moving at once and lays motionless in her hands. All of the many eyes carved into the hilt fall closed as one. Trixie starts back. The pillow she’s been half-hiding behind falls from her hands and hits the floor with a muted thump.

“Sorry,” she says, pushing her glasses back up the panic-sweaty bridge of her nose, “you could do that— Katya, you could do that _the whole time_?”

“Yes but I had to look it up and the book was too heavy and it was hard worrrrk!” Katya pouts at her, now absently rocking the knife in her arms. “And besides, it’s not like it was a super-pressing issue.” Trixie raises both eyebrows and glances pointedly around at the remains of her bedroom door. Katya, oblivious, says, “But if you’re going to be howling at all hours and disturbing my sleep for no good reason, then I suppose. . .”

Something close to hysteria rises in Trixie, the unpleasantness of being jerked out of sleep by a sentient knife just now plowing into her. She says, “Oh, no? No good reason? You haven’t noticed my _door_? You didn’t notice it trying to murder me for the past week and a half?”

“But it didn’t murder you though, Tritzie, did it.” Katya steps closer and places her hand over Trixie’s heart pointedly. In her chest, it does a strange little arrhythmic flutter, thrashes suddenly against her ribs. Trixie jerks back. Katya regards her, and says quietly, “Still beating, I see.”

Trixie flusters, tries for words a couple times before she manages, “I made a _shield_.”

“I’m going back to bed.”

* * *

Katya’s been keeping to herself most of the night, which suits Trixie just fine. She’s been able to do a bunch of things she doesn’t typically have the time for while also trying to entertain a large, hungry, undead toddler. There was even a whole hour in which she was able to poke around on some Reddit subthreads in search of a fertile hunting ground for virgins. Some incels have started a local Meetup to play Catan, and she’s bookmarked it on her browser to check out soon. Trixie did a sweep of the entire house to make sure that all of the windows are properly boarded up and there’s no chance of sunlight creeping in. She had to replace some of the cardboard in a couple of rooms because it has gotten soft and fuzzy with age and is in danger of tearing. The parlor has lush velvet drapes so heavy that Trixie can’t even draw them by herself, because the vampires like to be able to see out into the street and pick and choose from passersby like conveyor-belt sushi. In the daytime the door is locked and only Trixie has the key, because she doesn’t trust any of them not to be stupid enough to wander in and accidentally flambé themselves.

Finished with all of her familiar tasks for the night, Trixie goes upstairs and raps her knuckles lightly against the doorframe of Katya’s chamber. She’s standing with her back to the doorway, hovering a little ways off the ground, and she’s changed into one of her most precious gowns. It has a train, so that the fabric just brushes the floorboards even in spite of Katya’s levitating, and the bodice is fussy with layers of ruffles.

“Ah, Tritzie.” Katya turns around very smoothly. “Thank you for joining me.”

“Yeah, I had a lot of options tonight, but. . .” Trixie stands with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, suddenly awkward. She’s been daydreaming about this for five years, about how it will feel to have Katya’s mouth on her, to taste her blood.

Katya swoops at her like a ghoul, her white face suddenly enormous, and she settles right in front of Trixie. “You are very sassy. Shea and Sasha are right about you. You’re all mouth.”

Trixie’s face gets pink with pleasure and bashfulness. She’s wearing her hair up today and Katya reaches around and unfastens the ponytail holder. She stretches it between her thumbs and fires it across the room, lost to the shadowy recesses of the chamber forever.

“I hate those little things. So _tacky_. What’s wrong with a nice silken hair ribbon? Much gentler on the follicles.” She rakes her fingers through Trixie’s hair, her sharp nails just grazing Trixie’s scalp, until she’s satisfied. “Very nice, Tritzie. Close your eyes.”

“Oh my god,” Trixie breathes. Her eyes shutter closed and she feels suddenly vertiginous, panicky, the last human part of her railing furiously against the threat Katya poses. “Katya. Is this real?”

There’s a rustling. Trixie doesn’t dare peek. Katya is so close that Trixie can smell her, perfume and staleness and underneath, something coppery. “Very real. You’ve been very loyal to me, very good. I know I’m not always perfect at expressing it, but I do notice. Hold out your hands.”

When Trixie does, they’re trembling. Katya captures them out of the air, her own cold in some places and too hot in others. She’s tried to warm them over the candles again. Trixie says, “Oh my _god_. Katya, what’s. . . what. . .” She angles her chin, exposing her throat. Something nudges into her hands, flat and dry, papery. Trixie opens her eyes. “Wait. What. Is this.”

“This small card contains a great power.” Katya grins at her.

Trixie looks down at the envelope in her hands. “Oh my god.” Katya gestures at her to go ahead and open it and she does, fumbling with the wax seal. When she glances up, Katya’s face is alive with smugness, her stupid ruffly chest inflated.

“I have heard that at this place, you are welcomed as the long-lost scion of a powerful empire. See, it says right on there. . .”

“‘When you’re here, you’re family,’” Trixie reads aloud. “Uh-huh.”

Katya is growing more animated now and she drops down a few inches until her feet are touching the ground again. “And I have learned that there is a powerful enchantment on this place, surely wound up by one of the old and much-feared Italian Strega Nonnas, that your bowl of soup and your basket of bread will eternally refill.”

Trixie takes a slow, steadying breath and looks up at Katya’s face. “This is a ten dollar gift card to the Olive Garden.”

“Two whole dollars for each year!” Katya, delighted with herself, claps her hands a few times and bares her fangs again, her gaunt face working to show her glee. “In my village, olives were a great and treasured delicacy, reserved only for the rich! I could have never dreamed to dine in a whole garden of them!”

Humiliation scorches the earth in a neat circle around Trixie, ignites her, makes her cheeks glow with crimson vitality. “So you’re not going to turn me,” she says flatly.

Katya’s face goes totally blank for a second, and then she doubles over laughing, clutching her stomach as if it feels like anything. Trixie feels small and embarrassed, and she lets it make her furious. She throws the gift card down at Katya’s feet and storms out of the chamber and down the hall.

“Tritzieeee,” Katya calls after her. “But humans love food!” She’s floating along behind Trixie as she stomps down the stairs but she doesn’t close the space between them, doesn’t catch her even though they both know she could with ease. She could hypnotize Trixie into forgiveness if she felt like it, or stupify her, or ensnare her in her fucking web and drain the life out of her and give her nothing in return.

In the kitchen, Trixie busies herself rearranging the almost-empty cabinets. Most of the things in here are hers, and Sasha routinely goes around and tosses away all of the food Trixie has bought. She’s learned to keep the mini fridge in her room well stocked. There’s one cabinet full of flamboyant silverware, antique goblets they only use on the rare occasion they have guests at the house. Trixie has one plate, one set of cutlery, one glass.

“You know, like, sometimes I think you’re playing dumb to annoy me,” she says to a drawer of miscellaneous items, “And then I remember, nope, very much not an act.”

“I did research! About human gift-giving! You are being very harshing of my mellow!” Katya protests from the other side of the island.

“Can you please talk in your actual voice! And stop using that ridiculous accent!” Trixie snaps. Katya gasps and both hands fly to her breast. Her eyes flash dark in the low light of the kitchen, consumed completely for just a moment before they narrow at Trixie, pale and unsettling again. Trixie presses the back of her hand to her forehead, says, “You know what? You’re right. And I’m sorry. After five years, I should know what to expect.”

Katya floats easily up to sit on the countertop, her legs crossed at the ankles and the many-layered skirts of her dress pooling around her. When she speaks, the affectation has fallen out of her voice and, after two hundred years in America, it’s only lightly colored with her native Russian. “I mean, five years, Trixie, what’s the big deal, really? You’ll have so many five years in your fiddly little lifetime.”

“And I’m wasting the best of them here.” Trixie slams the drawer closed, quietly pleased to see that it makes Katya wince. It isn’t like it’s a secret. All vampires know what every familiar wants; it’s how they entice them in the first place. The promise of immortality, the luster of an eternity spent as a powerful, eldritch creature. The vampire holds this promise over the head of the familiar, and the familiar is so busy looking up at it they don’t even realize they’ve walked right into their undoing. Trixie works her tongue around her mouth to dispel the unpleasantly sour taste and says, “Katya, like, I’m not stupid. You’re never going to turn me, are you.”

She can’t look up, doesn’t want to witness what that does to Katya’s face, all the ways she continues to lie and manipulate. Trixie focuses instead on another drawer, which contains a stack of freshly laundered handkerchiefs and a little hexagonal thing of toothpicks.

“I’m still. . . you’re in training,” Katya says after a long, leaden pause. “You still have much to learn. I mean think of this as a, what would you call it, a growth opportunity.”

Anger wells up in Trixie, liquid and hot. She says sharply, “No! You know what, I did my unpaid internships in college. This is stupid.” She grabs the contents of the drawer, filled with the adolescent urge to throw things, to kick and scream. Everybody else in this fucking house gets to submit to the whim of their bruised ego whenever they feel like it. It’s Trixie’s turn.

She stalks out of the room and Katya yells after her, “Tritzie, come back here. I command you! You impudent, ungrateful—” Trixie pulls the cap off the container of toothpicks and throws the whole thing in Katya’s direction. They spill all over the floor at her feet and she says, “Oh, fuck _you_!” Trixie turns to gloat, to watch Katya wage a fast, heated internal battle before she drops to her knees and begins helplessly counting the toothpicks. She continues to yell at Trixie as she does. “You have a goat’s brain for a brain! Your face is a dog’s ass!”

Trixie slams out of the back door and onto the porch. Out here, the world is beginning to turn pink at the very edges. Trixie settles on the lone Adirondack chair and curls her legs up beneath herself. She pulls on a loose thread in the blanket draped over the arm and the whole thing puckers like a wound. A skein of geese travels over the house, honking ecstatically on their way someplace warm. Trixie rests her head against the back of the chair to watch the garden grow clearer in the wan light of pre-dawn. She really thought she’d seen her last sunrise.

* * *

“I think when I’m a vampire, this’ll be the hardest part,” Trixie muses. “I’ll miss doing my makeup.”

She’s brought her little cosmetics caddy down from her bedroom and, after Katya had some time to paw through it like a toddler and exclaim over the advancement in cosmeceuticals since she was alive, they’ve settled together next to the vanity. Katya is sitting remarkably still so far, even if she does keep screwing up her face in revulsion whenever she feels Trixie’s breath against her cheek.

“That’s because you are hopelessly vain, Tritzie. Mortals and their obsession with any shiny thing, always checking to make sure their ever-fading faces are still on straight, getting more withered by the day, pretending they don’t notice.” Trixie opts not to comment on that, not to point out the excruciating irony of Katya — of any vampire — casting aspersions about vanity. “Besides, what do I need with mirrors? It’s just a face. And anyway, I am surpassingly beautiful. I don’t need a mirror to confirm this.”

Katya preens, tilting her head all _come hither_ , letting Trixie get a good look at her. Trixie rolls her eyes and says, “Then what am I doing your makeup for? If you’re so perfect.”

“I never said I was perfect, did I? Just that I am surpassingly beautiful. I’d still like to look my best when I am seen by someone other than those two ghouls. No, not you,” she says to the two rogue ghosts drifting through the chamber and they wail, wounded. She flaps her agitated hands in their direction. “Now who are we gonna call about those?”

“I know somebody in Manhattan,” Trixie says absently. “Close your eyes and stop moving around so much. You already feel like a mannequin head, can you try to act like one?” Trixie takes Katya by the chin and angles her head just so. It’d be like trying to reposition something carved in marble or granite if Katya weren’t feeling amenable, if she didn’t allow Trixie to adjust her how she needs.

They’re both quiet as Trixie studies the geometry of Katya’s face. The whole routine, the rigamarole of Trixie’s usual makeup application, simply isn’t going to work on somebody so gaunt, with such severe bone structure. Somebody who is, by the way, fully dead, and pale in a way that far surpasses the capabilities of the Physicians Formula Butter Bronzer that Trixie has in her kit.

When Trixie meets Katya’s eyes she feels suddenly shy and has to look away again. Katya says, “What are you going to do to me?”

“Stake you, I guess, now that your guard’s down.” Trixie shrugs. Katya rears against the back of her chair and bares her fangs, gearing up to hiss, and Trixie rests a hand at her shoulder and says, “I'm kidding, I'm kidding.”

“This is not funny,” Katya says, but now that she’s in on the joke her mouth is taut at the corners.

Trixie rummages in her kit for a second, searching for the products she thinks Katya will actually have the patience for. She straightens up again, an assortment of tubes in her fist, and says, “Then stop smiling. You’ll ruin my work. I’m not doing anything crazy. Just… waking you up a little.”

“I am awake enough, thank you,” Katya says snippily.

“Uh-huh. This is mascara. Can you look up for me?”

Katya tips her entire head backwards and Trixie huffs a little laugh and touches her chin so she’ll straighten again. After a moment of confusion Katya takes the hint and fixes her gaze just north of Trixie’s forehead, her mouth hanging open slightly. This is the part that Trixie likes the least about doing somebody else’s makeup, the part she always made her friends do themselves back in high school and college, but of the two of them she has a better shot at getting it right than Katya does. She balances the heel of her hand against Katya’s cheekbone and applies a coat of mascara very carefully. It smudges just a little, and she swipes it away with the pad of her finger.

When she pulls back Katya is watching her intently, her mouth still open and her eyes dark on Trixie’s. She says, “Are your hands very warm for a human, Tritzie?”

Trixie takes her hand away from Katya’s cheek like it’s burned her and her eyes dart rapidly around the room, looking for an out. There’s nothing, Katya’s coffin standing proud in the middle of the space and the rest of it cluttered with centuries of paraphernalia. Trixie’s cheeks feel uncomfortably hot. She presses the back of her hand to one of them and says, “I think maybe just it’s been a while since someone’s touched your face.”

“Well, it’s very strange and you should do something about it.”

“ _You_ could do something about it,” Trixie says, a little too sharply. She tries not to bring it up if she can help it, afraid that each time she pushes Katya moves further away, grows less willing to turn Trixie. This time, Katya doesn’t react except to close her mouth, finally. “Okay. Do you like this red?” Trixie shows her the tube of liquid lipstick and she nods amenably. “I hoped— I thought you might.”

Trixie is so, so careful as she applies it. She knows that she’s safe, that Katya’s sharp teeth don’t hurt her and they won’t hurt Trixie either. Not unless Katya wants to. Still, it makes her heart feel closed tight like a fist to be so close to Katya’s mouth, to be touching her lips like this. It’s so strange to have Katya looking up into her face, allowing her to be taller. She’s very still, and Trixie goes still too, hardly daring to breathe. When she thinks she has the shape right she pulls back a little to see Katya’s mouth in the context of her whole face, and their eyes meet. Trixie feels everything inside of her drawn up and pulled taut, feels herself tugged towards Katya. She’s just watching Trixie, patient and quiet.

The moment Trixie is finished, Katya leaps up from the chair and says, “Well, that will do just fine.”

“But I haven’t done— I was gonna do some lashes if you wanted—” Trixie says uselessly, still holding the little wand applicator aloft.

Katya doesn’t turn around, is already halfway across the room as she babbles, “Great job, very nice, but I’m going to be late and the show will start, the show must go on, as they say, I’ve heard, don’t wait up.” She does turn then, half over her shoulder to point at Trixie. “Actually _do_ wait up, I am going to need your help taking all of this nonsense off later— BAT!” As soon as she yells it she’s in her bat form and fluttering jubilantly about the room. Trixie bites the inside of her cheek so as not to laugh at the tiny, crimson pout painted on the bat’s little face, the long swooping lashes. The creature hovers right over Trixie’s head, turns a tight, joyful circle, and then it darts out of the open window and into the night.

* * *

Trixie’s startle reflex has become woefully underutilized since she’s been Katya’s familiar. No one else in the house makes any noise at all, and all three of the vampires derive great pleasure from creeping up on Trixie as silently as they can and howling or swooping at her in their bat form. These days she doesn’t even blink, so she is completely unsurprised to open her eyes and see Sasha and Shea both peering down at her like she’s a stray they’ve encountered at the side of the road.

“Tiffany, there’s no need to be so upset,” Shea says when she sees that Trixie’s eyes are open. It isn’t dawn yet. The sun isn’t up but it will be very soon. Trixie isn’t feeling too concerned about reminding either of these two of that fact.

“It’s Trixie, and I do actually feel like you know that.”

Shea’s face does something approximating softness, something Trixie might call kindness if she were feeling at all kind herself. She reaches out and awkwardly pats the top of Trixie’s head, says, “Trixie. Yes. Of course we know.”

“You’re a very sensitive creature, Trixie, and many people will tell you that this is a bad trait,” Sasha says sagely. She’s been keeping back like she’s worried Trixie is mangy, but now she steps forward until she’s elbow to elbow with Shea. “But it’s not, it’s a lovely thing.”

“For one thing, it makes for the most delicious blood.”

Trixie’s eyes get enormous and she lets her head thunk against the back of the chair, says, “Oh, my _god_.”

“But, you know, we wanted to say. . .” Sasha looks to Shea, who nods encouragingly. “That it’s going to be alright.”

A fox darts through the backyard, on her way home after a night of scavenging. Sasha and Shea both turn in eerie synchronicity to watch her go. Trixie uses the moment of privacy to collect herself, to take her glasses off and clean them on the sleeve of her sweater where they’ve gotten fogged up from her hot, wet anger. When the vampires turn back around, she clears her throat and says, “Thank you. Honestly, thank you, that’s actually really nice of you to say. I just, I’m trying so hard, and. . .”

“Of course you are!” Shea says. “Anyone can see that.”

Sasha touches her wife’s arm and nods sincerely, says, “It’s very difficult work.”

“It _is_!” Trixie is growing more animated having the two of them agreeing with her and she straightens in the chair, drops her feet back to the floor.

“And not just anyone could do it,” Sasha says. The two of them are edging just ever so slightly towards the house, closer to the shadows as the sky begins to streak with orange and pink.

“No, they really, really couldn’t! And I just feel like—“

“It takes a truly special eye to understand art and lighting design,” Shea says. Trixie deflates into the chair, foolish and humiliated. Shea clicks her tongue and says, “It was wrong of us to get you involved when you so clearly don’t have what it takes.”

“You’re talking about your art project.”

Sasha comes closer again to say, “And it’s going to be fine, it really is. We’re going to hire a professional and the show will go on as scheduled. So you see? Nothing to be upset about.”

“Thanks,” Trixie says flatly. “Great. What a relief.”

The grass at the very edge of the yard begins to glow in the steadily creeping sunlight, so bright it’s gold and not green. Sasha lets out a garbled yell and she and Shea dart inside the house, retreating to the safety of their coffins. The world smells brand new, each blade of grass laden with a bead of dew so heavy it bows its head. People in the neighborhood are already waking up, beginning their day; Trixie hears a car door open and then slam shut again a little ways down the block. She rakes a hand through her hair and several strands of it catch on a hangnail at the edge of her thumb. Trixie goes to chew on it and then remembers she probably shouldn’t draw blood in a house filled with vampires.

She sits for a little while, not quite ready to go inside and put Katya to bed, not quite ready yet to be over her hurt. Everything is so quiet and still, so when Trixie hears an electric pop from inside the house it’s like a bomb going off. She’s out of her chair before she even really registers what’s happening, and through the front door just in time to see the old, dusty drapes in the parlor ignite. They’re so thick and heavy that they’re engulfed instantly. And Katya is standing right there, right in front of the newly-exposed window, looking quizzically at the charred end of an electrical cable in her hand. Trixie charges her with a shout and shoves her as hard as she’s able, sending them both sprawling onto the floor out of the way of the sunlight streaming in.

“What are you doing?!” she yells right into Katya’s face. Adrenaline tastes coppery in her mouth and her hands are trembling when she gets them beneath herself to lift up just a little. “Are you insane? You could’ve been killed!”

“Tritzie! I was. . . the Time Warp, if you must know!”

Trixie shakes her head violently. It does nothing to stop her ears from ringing. Katya is flat on her back beneath her and looking serenely up, like she’s at the bottom of a lake. “What?!” Trixie says. “Katya! The _sun is up_!”

“Oh would you look at that!” Katya peers around Trixie, at the sunlight pouring into the parlor now. It’s morning, and Katya is still awake.

“You could have _died_ , Katya!” Trixie clambers gracelessly to her feet and hunts around for something to block out the light. Some of the cardboard Trixie used to refortify the windows elsewhere in the house is still laying discarded in the hallway and she constructs a makeshift blind as hurriedly as she can.

When she’s done she turns to see that Katya has retreated to the very corner of the room where the light doesn’t quite reach. It’s still spilling, insistent and luminous, around the edges of the cardboard, but it’s going to have to do until she can get Katya safely in her coffin and see to it properly.

“I thought it was part of the girls’ little art project. Satan’s foreskin! That was a close call, wasn’t it.”

Trixie sits down heavily right on the ground next to Katya, both of them leaning against the wall. A taxidermy goat lives in this part of the room and Trixie doesn’t trust it one bit. She eyes it warily as she says to Katya, “You can’t just do things like this. You can’t. You have to be careful.”

“I am surprised to find that you care so much, Tritzie.”

“Of course I care,” Trixie says. She’s so far past indifference, past professional detachment. “Of course I do. Katya, you are— you make me so mad, and you refuse to say my name right, and you can be so _infuriating_ —”

“Do you know, Tritzie, when you began speaking it sounded like you might be preparing to say a _nice_ thing,” Katya interjects, a mischievous little tug at one corner of her mouth. It makes the fang on that side peek out, makes her eye come as close to creasing as her stupid immortal skin will allow.

Trixie takes a fortifying breath and lets it out slowly, like she’s coming down from a crying jag. “But I am not going to let you die. I’m not living without you, not even if you never turn me and I die a boring death of old age like a fucking _straight_ person.” Katya shudders, and Trixie feels fondness move over her face like sunlight. “I’m not going to lose you, not like that, not at all.”

They stare at each other, Trixie still breathless with panic, Katya calm and totally still. It’s felt recently as if every time Trixie looks up, Katya is seeking her out with her eyes. Now they’re steady on hers, certain. Katya’s hair has gotten messed up from Trixie tackling her and she reaches out to smooth it down, lets herself stay a while, longer than she really needs.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Katya says, and it’s the gentlest Trixie’s ever heard her, the Russian only weaving through her voice like a single, vibrant, crimson thread.

Trixie shrugs and says, “Well, yeah. I do. And what. What are you going to do about it?”

Katya begins to lean in, and Trixie does too. It isn’t the thrall. She feels clear-headed and braver than she’s ever been. Right before their mouths meet Katya pauses. Trixie gives her a tiny, tiny nod, and she’s the one to close the space between them, to kiss her. It isn’t as cold or as sharp as Trixie imagined it might be. She knows what Katya’s skin feels like, how touching her is like welcoming her inside from an unpleasantly cold day. She also knows that if she touches her long enough, Katya can absorb some of Trixie’s warmth, and she feels it blooming across her cheekbone now, beneath Trixie’s fingertips.

“Did you— oh my god,” Trixie says when they break apart. “Sorry. Wait.” She darts in again, kisses her again. “Okay. Wow. Did you. . . hang on, one more.” Katya laughs, and she’s the one to lean forward this time, the one to capture Trixie’s face in both hands and kiss her slow and careful. “Okay. Did you say you were doing the Time Warp?”

“Yes. Again.” Katya offers a weak, arrhythmic pelvic thrust. Trixie honks a laugh like a clown’s nose. “You like it so much, and you were so angry, and so I thought. . .”

“Katya, that is so dumb. That is so dumb and so nice.” Fondness roars through Trixie and she kisses her again. It’s been long enough since Katya ate that she doesn’t taste like blood at all. Trixie wants to sling her knee over Katya’s thighs and sink down, but she can feel the warmth of the day against her back even with the cardboard in the window. “Okay, okay, stop. We have to stop. You need to go to bed, it’s so early.”

For the first time since Trixie has known her, Katya is sweet and agreeable. She doesn’t let Trixie stand up right away, capturing her with the circle of her fingers around Trixie’s wrist and kissing her again. This time, she licks at Trixie’s bottom lip. Trixie makes a small noise, a little _humff_ , but she doesn’t give into it. To how badly she wants to open her mouth against Katya’s. It isn’t safe for either of them to become distracted right now. Trixie tugs easily out of Katya’s grip and gets to her feet, holds out a hand.

Katya doesn’t take it, not right away. Instead, she tilts her head and says indifferently, “And you need to enjoy your final day as a mortal.”

“I’ll go get your coffin all set up, just stay away from the—” Trixie begins to say, and then her brain crunches unpleasantly and she stumbles back a couple of steps, stares slack-jawed down at Katya. “Wait. What did you say?”

“Assuming you’d still like to be turned.” Katya shrugs.

Trixie’s head starts birring like ticker tape and she almost rolls her ankle. “Katya, are you serious? This isn’t another Amelia Bedelia-ass wacky misunderstanding you’re setting up?”

From the floor, Katya looks up at Trixie and gives her a closed-mouth smile. Something mournful passes across her face and she folds her hands in her lap, says, “You think I never get lonely? You think it isn’t, you know, a little bit of a bummer watching everybody fun die?”

“I never thought about it.” Trixie kneels down again, right at Katya’s side, and plucks one of her hands from her lap to hold in both of hers. “No. I never thought you seemed lonely.”

“Well I’m not _now_.” Katya reaches out to cradle Trixie’s face. She touches her thumb to Trixie’s bottom lip, and Trixie leans into the cup of her palm even though it is a little chilly. “I’m not _now_. And if you think I’m going to give that up you really are as silly as you look.”

Trixie turns her head just slightly so that she can kiss the pad of Katya’s thumb, and she says, “I’m not going to do your errands for you after, you know. Like, never again.”

Katya snatches her hand away from Trixie’s face and gasps in horror. “Not even if I ask nicely?”

“You’re not going to ask nicely.” Trixie laughs and leans in to steal another quick kiss, totally unable to help it now that she’s let herself begin. “But we’ll see.”

The birdsong is growing louder and louder, through the front door Trixie didn’t close behind herself on her way to save Katya’s life. She gets up again and goes to shut it, makes extra certain that it’s properly locked. Her hack job at covering the window is enough so that Katya can skirt around the edges of the room without the light touching her, but she still clings tight to Trixie and shrieks as they make their careful way to the staircase.

At the top, in the almost-darkness of the hallway, Katya stops walking and whips around to point an accusatory finger right into Trixie’s face. “I’m not usually so impulsive, you know. I’m a very serious person.”

“Katya, _impulsive_? It’s been _five years_!” Trixie says. Katya boops her on the nose and then rockets up and backwards so she can’t retaliate.

“I know, I know!” She drifts slowly back down, rocking ever so slightly like she’s caught in a breeze. When she lands on her feet again, she nudges her elbow softly into Trixie and winks at her. “Downright reckless. Ah well.” Trixie is so smitten she glows in the dark. Katya leans in and kisses her cheek, says very quietly against the shell of Trixie’s ear, “Feels kind of good to be bad, little bird, doesn’t it?”

**Author's Note:**

> beanie can be found on [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie), and stutter can be found on [tumblr](https://stutter8.tumblr.com/)! comments are our lifeblood ♡


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